


Raise Your Glass

by what_alchemy



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Siblings, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-29
Updated: 2016-01-29
Packaged: 2018-05-16 23:02:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5844370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>we gather at the graves of our dead</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Raise Your Glass

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [three sibling promp](http://mcuflashmeme.dreamwidth.org/2104.html)t at the [MCU Flash Meme](http://mcuflashmeme.dreamwidth.org).

**Arlington, 1969**

Becca was sure Steve would would have found the grandiosity of his grave embarrassing. It used to get her riled up on his behalf, but at this late date with decades to think about it, she figured it was less about Steve and more about what he represented to the war-torn American psyche. Or her own war-torn family, she thought, though their names would never match and no document could prove it. Family wasn’t paper and ink, anyway. Her eyes slid from the great tower of Steve’s monument several feet away to the more modest grave before her.

Becca hitched her shoulders up and tucked her nose into her coat against the cold. Hopping from foot to foot didn’t help, and neither did pulling her fingers into the palms of her gloves. She chanced a glimpse at her watch — 6:39 and she was still the only one here. She huffed out a sigh and scowled, burying her face further into her coat. Between that and the knit hat she wore, she was down to looking out at the rows and rows of graves through only a slit, but not thinking too hard on how many mothers’ sons had been stolen by war suited her just fine. She had a son and three nephews in the war even now, and though she knew down to her bones that there was no sharp-eyed man in the sky, just chaos, she got down on her knees every night to pray that the chaos would return them to her, alive and breathing instead of here in this cemetery she could visit only every few years. 

“Christ, twenty-five years, can you believe it?” came Frank’s voice behind her. She pivoted — well, teetered — around the bulk of her coat to peer at him through the slit of her winter wear. He was equally bundled, eyebrows a bushy shock of salt and pepper beneath his hat. At his sides he carried two floral wreaths. “Oh, don’t look at me like that,” he said. “I can see your angry eyebrows.”

“I’m freezing my buns off over here and you know it,” she said. “Ten minutes, Frank.”

“I don’t know where you got such a bee in your bonnet about the time from,” he said, “because it sure as hell wasn’t the Barnes side.”

“I just don’t understand why neither of you can be considerate enough to even attempt to be punctual for once in your lives.”

“Ah, hell, Beck, it’s a goddamn handful of minutes, come off it,” Frank said. “You know how traffic in this hellhole is.”

“And yet somehow I made it with time to spare.”

“Yeah yeah, and it makes you better than us, we know.”

“Don’t give me that tone, Francis Barnes.”

A figure emerged behind him, short and round and carrying a six pack as it hustled their way. 

“Will beer make you forgive me, Beck?” Helen called, raising the six pack in the air.

“Just get over here, wouldja?” Becca said. 

Frank arranged one wreath around their brother’s grave. Helen joined them at the marble headstone, less ornate than Steve’s but bigger and more prominent than most of the others. She set the six pack of a pilsner Becca didn’t recognize beside it, and they all stared at Bucky’s name as she popped some cans and shoved them into Frank and Becca’s hands.

“To Bucky,” she said, holding her own beer out.

“To Bucky,” Becca and Frank said in unison. They tapped their cans against Helen’s and each other’s and drank, even though it was too cold for it, and even though the beer was bitter and cheap. After a moment, the heat of the alcohol rolled through Becca like fog on a spring night. The taste made her remember in a flash, there and gone again like lightning: Bucky, handsome with his hair flopping over his forehead, laughing at the face she made the first time she swiped a sip of his drink. Steve, delicate with fistfight scars criss crossing his knuckles, saying Bucky’s name in consternation. Blue-eyed boys who’d swallowed the world so young. 

Frank bent over to grab another beer. He straightened and popped it open only to tip it out onto the grass. 

“To Steve,” he said. Becca and Helen echoed him, and Becca tipped damn near half the can down her throat. She watched Frank shamble over to Steve’s grave and set his wreath amongst the ostentatious many already strewn there, and when he came back, he set his beer to the side and shoved his hands into his coat pockets. 

Becca’s heart hurt, but it could have been the cold as easily as it could have been the passage of time. When she looked up, the sky was a churning miasma of purple and orange, and a slice of the moon was already floating there like a gossamer half-smile. She wondered what time it was in Vietnam. Was it twelve hours’ difference, or was it thirteen? Was it tomorrow there, or was it yesterday? Was it rainy season again, and did the rain cut the heat or make it worse? She closed her eyes against the sky, against the stark black engraving of her brother’s name, against the sound of her brother and sister’s breath harsh in the cold.

“You heard from Ricky lately?” she said when the silence grew too loud.

“Got a letter last month,” Frank said. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him shrug. “You know how those front letters are. ‘Everything’s great, Pop, the girls sure are pretty.’”

“Right,” Becca said. 

“Jack?” he asked.

“Same,” Becca said. She didn’t mention how his handwriting had gone so slanted and shaky it might as well be some other boy writing her. Platitudes and compliments to the cooking he missed under her roof. Whenever she closed her eyes, the hollow-eyed look her husband wore for so long after the war imposed itself on her son’s face.

“How ’bout Marianne’s boys?” Helen said. “What were their names?”

“Paul and Tommy,” Becca said. “Paul got a new assignment, but I didn’t get details. And Tommy—” She shrugged. That’s all there was to say about any of it, she supposed. 

“What do you think of Nixon?” Frank said. 

“You know I got no time for politics, Frank,” Becca said. Men’s politics and wars got her right where she was this moment: drinking on her brother’s grave and wondering if she’d have to move here soon to tend her son’s. No, she had no energy to spare for debating which sly-talking figurehead could dash hopes quicker.

“Too old to go believin’ in anyone with a seat so high above the rest of us,” Helen said. 

“He’s makin’ noise like he’s gonna end the draft,” Frank said. “I’ll vote for him next election if he does, lily-livered Quaker or not.”

Helen only grunted and sipped at her beer some more. Wind rustled the leaves. If she listened closely, Becca could hear the fizzle of the beer’s carbonation. 

“What if he’d come home?” she said suddenly. “What if they’d both come home?”

The wind sent Frank’s discarded beer can skipping along toward other graves. He followed it, and Helen followed him, and Becca stayed a long time in the cold.

 

**Prospect Park, 2017**

Bucky had ordered a memorial tree, and he’d checked the box for silver maple.

One month later, what he got instead was some kind of sad Canadian baby.

“It’ll get bigger, Buck,” Steve said beside him. “It’ll be here for a long time.”

There it stood, barely more than a tender bud, green and practically barkless. The plaque bearing his sisters’ and brother’s names looked prepared to beat it up. There was even a little wire fencing around what passed for its trunk to protect it from exactly such a scenario.

“I just…it was supposed to be something else. This big magnificent thing I could do for them.”

“And it will be,” Steve said. “It already is.”

“A squirrel could kill this thing, Steve,” Bucky said. He heard the telltale strangle of Steve smothering a quick laugh.

“No, hey.” Steve took his hand, the flesh and blood one, and Bucky didn’t even look around to make sure no one was watching. “Think about it. There it is, this lovely little tree, taking in the waste we create in order to produce something that gives us life instead. It’s patient, and someday it’ll be big enough to climb, or have picnics under, or install a swing in. It’s just this gentle, beautiful bit of green that gives everything of itself to make the world better, and all it needs is time.”

Bucky locked his fingers around Steve’s. He resisted the urge to bury his nose in the space where Steve’s neck met his shoulder and never let go.

“You are such a sap,” he said. In his peripheral vision, he saw one half of Steve’s mouth spread slow and tilted into a smirk.

“You know what I heard?” Steve said.

“What?”

“I heard you were a Hufflepuff.”

Bucky gasped. “Who said that? I’ll cut them.”

“The tree told me when you ordered it.”

“Rogers, I swear to God…”

“Shh.” Steve knelt before the tree. The wind had blown a leaf over the plaque, and he took a moment to clear it and polish it up with his t-shirt. It was real classy, the plaque Bucky’d gotten. Platinum, made to weather the elements, guaranteed not to rust. He could have paid his 1942 rent twenty times over with money to spare for how much the tree and the plaque had set him back, but it was barely a dent in his bank account now. Somehow, all the wealth and ostentation of the memorial he’d chosen seemed not enough. He wondered if there was anything that would be enough.

Rebecca Barnes Leighton  
1920-2015

Francis C. Barnes  
1922-1999

Helen V. Barnes   
1923-2011

Steve stood back up when their names shone spick and span. Bucky leaned into him.

“This was selfish,” he said.

“How’s that?”

“They each have their own graves. Where they _chose_ to rest, even if it was far from each other. And here I am—”

“This honors them, Buck,” Steve said. “And if you think for a second any of them ever would have been offended by this—”

“That’s the thing, though, isn’t it?” Bucky said. “I didn’t know them. The children I knew were long gone by the time I came back. They’d had their whole lives while I was off getting blood on my hands. Did you know Becca’s only son died in the war, and his body was too badly burned to even send home? Christ, Steve. I coulda been there for all we know. Maybe they’d be ashamed of me. Disgusted. I wouldn’t even blame them.”

Steve leaned against Bucky in turn. Sometimes, the sheer size and weight of him seemed like a trick Bucky’s mind was playing. 

“I can’t make you be less hard on yourself,” Steve said. “I wish I could carry this for you, but I can’t.”

“Aw, hell, Steve, I don’t...”

Steve turned toward him, hips anchored to his, and smoothed Bucky’s hair away from his face.

“Graves, memorials — they’re for the living,” he said. “And this one isn’t some slab of stone doing nothing but taking up space, tucked away from normal life. It’s alive, and it’s life-giving. There’s nothing shameful or selfish about this, okay?”

Bucky nodded, throat tight. Steve took his hand again and stepped away.

“C’mon,” he said. “Tell me about the time Helen found all your ‘water balloons’ and bombed your parents with them.”

“Oh, Christ, the hiding I got for that.”

Steve snickered. A breeze picked up, and the tree’s tiny leaves swayed gently, glinting in the sunlight. Bucky followed wherever Steve’s feet were taking them. 

“How about the time Frank traded all his marbles for one magic bean and I had to go threaten the little shit who’d hoodwinked him?”

“You know?” Steve said. “I’d like to hear that one again, too.” 

Slowly, quietly, the tree grew.

**End**


End file.
